Splitting off the Wikinews discussion from the branding discussion...
On Tue, 16 Apr 2019 at 07:52, Jennifer Pryor-Summers <
jennifer.pryorsummers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Compared to Wikitribune it is! But more importantly, if Wikinews is not
> thriving, then why not? Does it lack resources? What could or should the
> WMF do to revive it?
In my opinion, nothing. Wikinews was a nice idea, but it didn't work out,
and I don't think the Wikimedia Foundation investing resources into trying
to bring it back to life is really worth it. In fact, I think the Wikimedia
Foundation isn't the right group to try to breathe new life into the
project anyway—we, as a volunteer community, could invest our time in
bringing new content into it. That doesn't happen though. Why is that? For
me, I'm voting with my actions rather than my words—it's because it just
isn't important enough compared to other things. It's okay to think that.
Also, I'd prefer to see the Wikimedia Foundation trying to do fewer things
but do them better rather than taking more on; I think the annual plan
reflects that it is trying to do so.
> Perhaps some of the money spent on rebranding would
> be better spent on the projects that are not doing so well as the big
> Wikipedias -- or perhaps the WMF should cut its losses and close them down,
> on the principle of reinforcing success instead.
>
I suspect that significantly less money is being spent on this rebranding
effort than people might think. A short engagement with an external
consultant, and some staff time to think about it and publish some pages to
solicit comment, is a relatively small investment compared to what it might
take to bootstrap improvements to breathe life into a mostly dead project.
I don't think it's really helpful to guess about the cost of things... yes,
I broke my own rule right at the start of this paragraph. ;-)
Dan